Erich Jantsch Biography

Wikipedia proved to be an unreliable place to house the contextualized information that I’ve been collecting. Much of the Wikipedia biography that I had been working on was tailored (removed) by a Wikipedian. And so, I created this page here on my site and will continue to update it for those who are interested. The domain, “erichjantsch.com”, forwards to this page. Should you wish to invest in a full Website to profile this amazing man, please contact me and I will turn over the domain. If you have anything to add to this page, please contact me.

Jantsch, who had initially started quite conservative with astrophysics, apparently felt that for him there is more to life than to deal with detail questions of physics. He became a leader in the social systems design movement in Europe in the 1970s.[1]Additionally, he was an astrophysicist, music critic, urban planner, futurologist, one of the six founding members of the Club of Rome , author and lecturer.

In the mid-1960s his increasing concern regarding the future led him to study forecasting techniques. He did not believe that forecasting or science could be neutral.[2]

Jantsch considered the following: If it were possible to understand the principles of creation and to make it widely understood, then it might be possible to organize people so that a viable overall system is created.

People often comment that Jantsch was very committed to his work and a very kind man.

Jantsch died in Berkeley, California, on December 12, 1980, “after a short but painful illness”[4][5] and before his book, The Evolutionary Vision, was published.[3]Magoroh Maruyama wrote in a eulogy,

“Jantsch succumbed at the age of 51 to the material and physical hardships that worsened progressively during the last decade of his prolific and still young life. This makes us realize again the harsh and brutal conditions of life some of the innovators must endure. … Let us face squarely the fact that Jantsch was given no paid academic job during a decade of his residence in Berkeley—a town considered to be a foremost spawning ground of scientific and philosophical innovations.” Jantsch penned his own epitaph: “Erich Jantsch died on __ in Berkeley after a painful illness. He was almost 52 and grateful for a very rich, beautiful and complete life. His ashes have been scattered over the sea, the cradle of evolution.”[6]

Profile

Every scholar needs a good elevator pitch for use in scholarly work and conversation. I have seen many attempts at creating one for Erich Jantsch. The description of ‘astrophysicist’ only describes a small portion of his work and efforts. This section is a collection of the many elevator pitches I have come across to describe Jantsch.

“Moreover, since 1965 Erich Jantsch had been directing a large research project, commissioned by the Scientific Affairs Directorate headed by Alexander King, on existing institutions, research and methodologies for long-term forecasting. Jantsch, educated as an astronomer, had specialised in system sciences and became an influential scholar in the diffuse field later to be called future studies. His report, published in 1967 as Technological Forecasting in Perspective, was a state-of-the-art study that influenced future scholars and planners well into the 1970s.” [15]

Career

Visiting Lecturer of Planning and Research Planner of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley.[7]

Lectured widely in Europe, North and South America, Near East and Japan.[7]

Advisor to twenty governments, several international organizations and research institutes.[7]

1960s- Research Associate at MIT, where he studied the future of MIT and the American University.[8]

1968- The first (inaugural) meeting of The Club of Rome, Jantsch had just completed an extensive 400 page report about the strategies by which technologies were developed and introduced in different parts of the world.

1968- Jantsch organized a conference in Bellagio, Italy, where some of the leading systems scientists (Beer, Forrester, Peccei…) gathered to co-create an answer to this question.

1968- Jantsch pens, “A tentative framework for initiating system-wide planning of world scope” for the Club of Rome.

1969- Jantsch and Ozbekhan make a presentation of the problematique to a meeting at the European Summer University in Alpbach, Austria in September, 1969. [12]

1970- co-editor of Technological Forecasting. [16]

1970- Jantsch serves as Richard Merton Professor at the Technical University in Hanover, Germany.[8]

1971- Jantsch serves as the Austrian delegate to the first session of the UN Committee on Natural Resources.[7]

1979- University of California at Berkeley hosts Jantsch for the Gaither Lectures in Science Systems; lectures led to The Self-Organizing Universe.

Personal life

1929: Jantsch was born in Vienna, Austria on January 8, 1929 to Olga Kantor and Hans Jantsch.

1951: Jantsch sailed the S. S. Independence at age 22 on August 29 from Genoa. He arrived in NY on September 7. He is headed to Indiana University. Oddly, many other fellow passengers are also heading to colleges and universities. He is single and has 2 pieces of luggage.

1952: Jantsch again sailed the S. S. Independence to Genoa, Italy at age 23.

1979: He emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-fifties, but did not receive his green card until 1979.[9]

Jantsch was without a job for the last few years of his life, living in an “apartment in Berkeley: dark and depressing room,with massage parlors above and below; a typewriter, a plant, and scattered copies of his favorite newspaper, Neue Zurcher Zeitung”.[9] It was here that he finished his last book, The Self-Organizing Universe. He made a living and supported his mother “by giving lectures all over the world, through writing, and by relying on a few friends”.[9]

1980: Jantsch died on December 12, 1980 in Berkeley, California, ” alone and lonely, abandoned by friends, misunderstood by colleagues”.[9] His ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.

Dedications

1972 – “Technological Planning & Social Futures” is dedicated to “Ritva and Matti”.

1975 – “Design for Evolution” is dedicated to “Anne”.

The author of this site has not found anyone named above who knew of Erich Jantsch, nor has she found anyone close enough to him to know about his family.

Education

1951: Doctorate in Astrophysics, University of Vienna (age 22).

According to Dino, “Jantsch decided that he had more urgent things to do than physics. Hence we find him working as a systems scientist, on the interface between society and technology.”

Accomplishments

In 1974, Jantsch stayed at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, “where he was one of the first distinguished residents invited by the Rockefeller Foundation”.[9] Jantsch “served as a consultant to the Directorate of Scientific Development of the O.E.C.D. and as a member of the executive committee of the Club of Rome”.[9]

Influences

Ralph H. Abraham, an American mathematician and has been involved in the development of dynamical systems theory in the 1960s and 1970s, was introduced to Jantsch in 1974 by Terence McKenna, an American esoteric philosopher, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, lecturer, and author whose alma mater was also Berkeley. Of the meeting, Abraham says “Erich was, at that time, a professor of management science at UC Berkeley, impressed by Prigogine’s work on self-organization, and was editing a volume with Conrad Waddington (the theoretical biologist) called Evolution and consciousness (published in 1976). I recognized Erich, although quiet and modest, as an original polymath and genius. He had just completed a book, Design for evolution (1975), which was a seminal work on general evolution theory (GET). He invited me to contribute a chapter to his book with Waddington, and in the summer of 1974 I sent him a report on my vibrations project. Waddington died during the preparation of this book. When the book was published, I found myself in the company of Waddington, Prigogine, Jantsch, and other luminaries of GST, GET, and so on. I read their works for the first time. Soon, Erich invited me to contribute to another collection, The evolutionary vision. This time I sent him an essay more in the line of his main interest, the evolution of consciousness. And when this book appeared in 1981, I found myself again in interesting company: Prigogine, Jantsch, Kenneth Boulding, Hermann Haken, Peter Allen, Howard Pattee, Elise Boulding, and several others, visionaries of self-organization, GST, GET, and so on. Eventually I met most of them. Unfortunately, Erich died prematurely before this book appeared.” [3, pp. 389-390] In an email conversation, Ralph Abraham told me that “he put a lot of energy into his wonderful books, and was very kind to me”. Also, “when i met him (1970s) he was living alone in Berkeley and was rather unhappy”. Abraham believed his colleagues abandoned him “perhaps because he saw so far into the future”.

Alexander Kingwas a scientist and pioneer of the sustainable development movement who co-founded the Club of Rome in 1968 with the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei. At the time of the Club of Rome’s founding, King was a “top international scientific civil servant, Scots by birth, living in Paris. Erich Jantsch served as a consultant of Alexander King’s at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). King invited Jantsch to “prepare a background paper for the meeting. This he did under the title “A tentative framework for initiating system wide planning of world scope” (p. 35). King refers to Jantch as a “brilliant systems scientist” (p. 56). Of this paper and first Club of Rome meeting, King says, “The meeting turned out to be a complete flop. The background paper by Jantsch was a scholarly plea for long term planning leading to proposals for action partly based on the methodology and recent experience of some of the Californian think-tanks. While his paper was academically exciting, it failed to secure the undivided interest of many of the invitees. It was too technical, too dense in the expression of ideas that were partly concealed in half-understood verbiage. The very title of the Jantsch paper, a tentative Framework for initiating systems-wide Planning on a world Scale was formidable enough to frighten off some of the participants from the outset. Discussion was distinctly irritable and often irrelevant. Many were deterred by the technical language of the paper and took issue with the use of words and terms; there was, for example an endless semantic fight between English and French-speakers on the meaning of the word systems. All this detracted from serious discussion of the approaching world issues that we had intended and even Aurelio’s charismatic appeal was quite unable to bring the meeting back to coherent discussion.” (p. 56) [13]

Hasan Özbekhan, a Turkish American systems scientist, cyberneticist, philosopher and planner, also co-founder of the Club of Rome.

Aurelio Peccei, Italian scholar and industrialist, best known as the founder and first president of the Club of Rome, was seeking was an effective methodology to tackle the issues of what he termed the “problematique”, which he described in The Chasm Ahead as “a tidal wave of global problems”. He sought the views of a well-known American systems analyst, Professor Hasan Ozbekhan, on the development of the first compendium of global problems (problematique) for the Club of Rome. Ozbekhan became interested and he and Jantsch made a presentation of the problematique to a meeting at the European Summer University in Alpbach, Austria in September, 1969. [12]

West Churchman, was an American philosopher and systems scientist, who was Professor at the School of Business Administration and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his pioneering work in operations research, system analysis and ethics. Churchman inspired Jantsch, Christakis and Ozbekhan.

Interests

*He loved art, music, and theatre. “He was a music critic in Vienna for many years and maintained his interests in the arts until his death (over 300 reviews).” [9]

Connections

Oskar Kokoschka- Jantsch was friends with “Oskar Kokoschka, Austrian painter, who prophesied an untimely death for him – Erich did believe him”. Oskar Kokoschka died February 22, 1980.

Milan Zeleny wrote an obituary about Jantsch for Human Systems Management.

C.H. Waddington- Jantsch co-edited, “Evolution and Consciousness”, with C.H. Waddington. Waddington once said, “I realize now that the word ‘Jantsch’, besides being a surname of an individual, is, or ought to be, the name of a certain quality – something allied to zest, verve, dash, elan, combined with efficiency and accomplishment.”

Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote the foreword for Jantsch’s, ”Technological Planning and Social Futures” [7]. Both authors were also featured in the book, “The Futurists”- Jantsch in an interview and de Jouvenel’s essay.

*Hasan Özbekhan and Jantsch were both “influenced by American approaches to future studies, as well as environmentalist thinking”. Both belonged to the Club of Rome and Jantsch quoted Özbekhan often in his work. [10]

1968: “A tentative framework for initiating system-wide planning of world scope” (only record I could find is in the C.H. Waddington archive section of the University of Edinburgh archives). {not found}

Other Publishing

To Note

The Club of Rome was formed when a small international group of people from the fields of academia, civil society, diplomacy, and industry, met at a villa in Rome, hence the name. Hasan Özbekhan, Jantsch and Alexander Christakis were responsible for conceptualizing the original prospectus of the Club of Rome titled “The Predicament of Mankind”. [10]

Jantsch coined the “concept of “uncontrolled growth” of the human system, which he described in cybernetic terms. To him, man has to become the self-regulator automatism in that system in order to design his own future” [10] (p. 101).

*Later in his life, Jantsch considered most of his technical work (forecasting, technological planning, social futures) “useless and unworthy” [9].

Related Current Events, Connections, and Interested Folks

Recent Features

2015: Jantsch is mentioned in Blanchard’s article, “4 Technoscientific Cornucopian Futures versus Doomsday Futures” in the compilation, The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics: Forging the Future. [10]

2011: Jantsch is mentioned several times in Wheatley’s book, “Leadership and the new science: Discovering order in a chaotic world” [11].She quotes Jantsch’s, “The Self-Organizing Universe” while discussing dissipative structures, system self-renewal, and establishing order in organizations.

1990: Jantsch is mentioned in June Singer’s Seeing through the visible world. “She quoted and cited Jantsch for bringing forth a deeper perspective on human and cultural evolution than those found in more “developmental” modes such as Wilbur’s– she notes that Jantsch’s is closer to a gnostic, archetypal view, going beyond mechanistic ways of viewing our world.” [Thanks to Dr. Charles Smith] Singer, J. (1990). Seeing through the visible world: Jung, gnosis, and chaos. Harper & Row Publishers.

Conversations

2014: In an email correspondence between myself and Milan Zeleny, Dr. Zeleny said Jantsch, who he described as a “a gentle Viennese genius”, “was not a specialist, but an Austrian systems thinker. He abhorred reductionist and mechanistic thinking, embraced holism, autopoiesis and biological paradigm in social systems … he was proud, unbending and in abhorrence (disgusted) of simplicity and stupidity; he felt real pain”. He loved both Berkeley and America. In the obituary that Zeleny [9] wrote, Jantsch was abandoned by colleagues. Zeleny says that this might be because they were uncomfortable around him and couldn’t see his genius. Also, he didn’t play departmental politics and bow to administrators. The collegial culture in Vienna is much different than the US/ Berkeley. Zeleny didn’t know if Jantsch ever married, nor did he mention any family. He says Jantsch got along well with women, because he didn’t have to compete with them. Zeleny and Jantsch visited each other and Zeleny says “I was privileged to be his friend”. In the obituary, Zeleny said “Kokoschka predicted an untimely death for Jantsch”. Of this, Zeleny said that Jantsch also predicted that Zeleny “would die within a year” if he did not leave Denmark. “I left; he died a year later”.

2015: In an email correspondence between Dino Karabeg (University of Oslo), Leah MacVie (Canisius College), and Alexander Laszlo (Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires), Karabeg said: “But what is most interesting about Jantsch was that he was a foremost proponent, indeed an icon, of some most vital and agile ideas. He:

switched from physics to systems science (OECD Paris) to investigate a key issue — how technological innovation has been used to create a mass suicide machine; and how can we do better than that. And so he — being the smart guy he was — follows a logical sequence of steps to be part of the solution, and

publishes that long OECD report about technological planning in different countries,

is invited by Alex King (who was the OECD research director and co-founder of the Club of Rome) to give a keynote at the CoR’s opening in 1968, saying most probably ‘it’s the systems’

organizes the Bellagio conference with some leading systems scientists later the same year, and issues Perspectives of Planning with the Bellagio Declaration (I am writing from memory)

then — asking himself who / what institution / will do all that, decides it’s got to be the university; then goes to MIT for a semester and writes that report you’ve been writing about in your (Leah MacVie’s) blog and thesis

Then moves to Berkeley, etc.

2015: In an email correspondence between myself and Ralph Abraham, Dr. Abraham said that when he met Jantsch in the 1970s, “he was living alone in Berkeley and was rather unhappy”. He believes that he may have been abandoned by friends and colleagues also because “he saw so far into the future”. Lastly, he says, “he put a lot of energy into his wonderful books, and was very kind to me”.

References

Christakis, A.N.; Bausch, K. C. (2006). How people harness their collective wisdom and power to construct the future in co-laboratories of democracy. IAP. ISBN1593114826.